Enlarged Prostate’s Fatal Consequences

Enlarged prostate is definitely an annoyance.

But other than potential prostate cancer, it’s not usually considered very dangerous.

However, a new study published in BMJ reveals how enlarged prostate can cause sudden death and three fatal diseases (other than prostate cancer).

Urinary retention is commonplace in men with enlarged prostates. Because the prostate is too large, it compresses the urethra and prevents urine from passing out of the bladder. If you aren’t able to empty all of the urine from your bladder, you have chronic urinary retention.

As you get older or as your prostate grows, it becomes more likely that you will develop bouts of acute urinary retention.

When this happens, you cannot empty urine from your bladder at all, so it remains completely full. This is painful and life-threatening and requires immediate treatment.

The literature review on this issue published in the BMJ journal shows that around 10% of men in their 70s and 30% in their 80s suffer from acute urinary retention at some point, with 13 men developing it for every woman that does so. The most common cause among men is an enlarged prostate.

Because the pressure from urine that builds up in the bladder can damage surrounding organs and cause the urine to back up into the kidneys, the authors of this study wanted to know whether people who had suffered from this condition were more likely to develop urogenital, colorectal, or neurological cancers.

They obtained data from the Danish national health service, through which all citizens have free access to doctors, hospitals, and drugs.

They used the Danish National Patient Registry to identify 75,983 people who had been diagnosed with their first bout of acute urinary retention between 1995 and 2017, along with people who had no such diagnosis with whom to compare them.

They then used the Danish Cancer Registry to identify all cases of cancer in both groups. They were specifically interested in cancers of the urinary tract, genitals, prostate, bladder, kidney, renal pelvis, colorectum, and nervous system.

This information enabled the researchers to calculate their participants’ cancer risk at three months, one year, and five years after a diagnosis of acute urinary retention.

1. Within the first three months, there were 218 extra cases of prostate cancer per 1,000 person-years in the urinary retention group, and an extra 21 excess cases per 1,000 person-years up to the first year, but not longer.

2. There were 56 extra cases of urinary tract cancer per 1,000 person-years within the first three months.

3. There were 12 extra cases of colorectal cancer per 1000 person-years within the first three months.

4. There were 2 extra cases of neurological cancer per 1000 person-years within the first three months.

Therefore, acute urinary retention is clearly associated with a variety of cancers.

This is why it is important to address the most common cause of this inability to urinate—in men, this is an enlarged prostate blocking urinary flow.

Fortunately, it’s quite easy to shrink an enlarged prostate using simple diet and lifestyle changes. Thousands of men have successfully done this by following the simple steps explained here…